Willits man get 21 years for molesting daughter

A Willits man who molested his daughter for about eight years has been sentenced to serve 21 years in a state prison.

A jury convicted Conrad Aten, 45, of continuously sexually abusing a child, oral copulation with a person younger than 16, oral copulation with a person younger than 18, penetration with a foreign object on a child younger than 16 and penetration with a foreign object on a child younger than 18.

The girl reported the abuse at age 17 after her father announced his intention to move out of California, then tried to kill himself when she said she didn't want to go with him, according to court documents.

She reported that he started the abuse -- which at the time included "heavy petting" and oral sex -- when she was 9 years old, shortly after she was taken from her mother because of her mother's drug use, according to court documents.

Aten got legal custody of the girl, who lived with him and his wife briefly in a trailer north of Willits until the trio moved to Tennessee and bought property, where the abuse began.

He reportedly molested the girl about every other day, and told her the acts were "a secret between the two of them and that society was wrong to think he should not be able to molest her," according to court documents.

Aten became a cross-country truck driver after he and his wife divorced, and he took his 12-year-old daughter on the road with him and home-schooled her. They moved in with friends in Southern California about a year later, and the abuse continued another three years.

The girl told authorities that when she resisted her father's sexual advances, he would "try and make her feel guilty," telling her "he was only molesting her because he loved her and ... she was hurting his feelings by saying no." Aten would be mad at her for a few days and go back to molesting her, according to court documents.

The girl told authorities she had always felt that what her father was doing was wrong, but that she was "fearful because of her experience with CPS breaking up her family in the past," according to court documents.

The Southern California friends asked Aten and his daughter to leave, and the two moved into a cabin with Aten's father on Highway 101 between Covelo Road and Laytonville until they moved in June or July of 2011 into a trailer on the property, where the girl said there was only one bedroom and a bed she and her father shared.

Aten tried to have sex with his daughter several times during that time frame, according to court documents, and her refusal led to "huge fights." On one occasion, he reportedly told her she "needed practice" having sex if she wanted to have a boyfriend or husband, and again tried to have sex with her.

She refused, and Aten tried the next day to commit suicide by overdosing on prescription medicine, prompting her to stay with her grandmother and make the report. Aten was arrested in Michigan Dec. 12, 2012, about two months later.

According to a Mendocino County Probation Department report on Aten, filed with the court Aug. 13, "When interviewed, Mr. Aten stated, I fell in love with my daughter. I can't distinguish between love and sex.'" he also claimed he was sexually molested as a child "and said his conduct, in essence was learned behavior," according to the report.

When probation admonished him that he should have known better than anyone how molestation affects a child, Aten said he couldn't stop himself, and that he "suffered from two voices in his head' telling him different things. My daughter said I had the devil in my head, and I think she is right,' he stated."